You're an American citizen I've no idea why you'd think that, but the British spellings in my posts might be a hint that I'm not...

Your anger is directed in the wrong direction. You should be looking at the judge who signed the court order. The various police forces are expected to make mistakes on occasion, that's why they have to go to a judge to get a court order before this kind of action. The judge failed to do his job, and so should be disbarred and possibly subject to other penalties.

I dont see anything in your post here that would indicate that your English dialect is different from the American one (e.g. colour/metre/theatre/defence/civilisation/foetus/etc). Assuming someone would notice your posts elsewhere and come to this conclusion that you're not American is somewhat of a stretch.

Yeah, I love the search features in it as well. I noticed that google.com browser sniffs for opera and disables many of the newer features for their products in opera only (even if opera supports them, since their html5/css3 support is similar to chrome 7 and firefox4). Masking opera as firefox brings up instant search in google as well as their newer image search. Not that I really like either of those, but other people do I'm sure. However, their browser sniffing is less of a "screw you" to me and more of a "thank you for not making me use the crappy new image search you forced on everyone not using opera."

There's no hardware acceleration yet, but it could be coming in a further dot release and benefit XP users as well as Mac, Linux and Windows 7/Vista users.

Actually, it does have the ability to use hardware acceleration for graphics in both opengl and direct3d, it just has not been implimented in general release versions of opera yet. See this discussion for more details and a post by an Opera developer. Currently, as the links mention, Opera's rendering engine is pure software, but it seems to keep up well enough with the browsers that have opted for hardware acceleration so far. I'm guessing they wont implement it until they can make sure it works on Windows/OSX/Linux/Unix, since they try to keep uniform support most of the time on all major Operating Systems.

I've been a long time Opera user, switching from Mozilla (pre firefox) to Opera when it became free (as in beer). However, I do get irritated by their efforts to keep up with Chrome's speed while screwing over long time users (they cant win that fight in the long run anyways, Google has way too much money). Numerous bug reports on long time stable features and major regressions happen every time they release a major update for Opera and take months or years to fix. From Opera 10.5 to pre 11, tool tips would cover up other applications even if Opera was located in the background. If you happen to have a mouse with arrow buttons for back and forward, the forward arrow button has been broke as far as using the "fast forward" feature since 10.5. At one point, during the version 11 betas, the arrow buttons were broke period (though it was a development release so one cannot really complain about that). With Opera 11, their famous mouse gestures are also partially broken with their implementation of a graphical interface for showing what gestures do what when you hold down the right mouse button. One of the more useful gestures was "right" + "left" + "right" (closes the current window). Now, with the changes they have made, this gesture only works half the time, but they have said they will fix it, but it's tied into the UI they implemented, so it will probably be a while.

They do generally listen to their users. They decided to force chrome like urls on their users during the Opera 11 development (removing "http://" and any of the args after *.com such as ?id=12345) claiming it would make users less likely to click fraudulent links. However, if you're a developer, seeing the arguments is a must and not seeing "http://" or "https://" or "ftp://" is just kind of silly, since sometimes you like to know what protocol you are using instead of guessing through some abstract replacement graphic. Since opera has never been a browser to appeal to novice internet users, dumbing it down seems kind of counter intuitive.

Opera is still my primary browser (except for development--I prefer Firefox/Firebug for that over Opera Dragonfly, but it seems every new version they release, I dread what long time feature they will break next. They haven't frustrated me enough to want to modify the Chromium source code to natively have all the features of Opera, but I wouldn't hold my breath on it for Opera 12.

I have never respected trolls before, but I guess there's a first time for everything. If he does get executed, someone should really saint him. Pastafarians maybe.

Last I knew, the Catholic Church did not have a candidate for patron saint of trolls. Perhaps there's a first.

add "127.0.0.1 connect.facebook.net" (without the quotes) to your host file, just to clarify.

Blocking connect.facebook.net in your hosts file (/etc/hosts or c:\windows\system32\drivers\etc\hosts) will probably take care of any third party meddling related to facebook or if you use Chrome or SRWare Iron (Chrome without the creepy google tracking) this will do what you ask as well.

How exactly is a firefox addon useful when they said they're supporting FireFox, but not Chrome or Opera?

Men don't have to be passionate about computers and programming to do well in our field. It's possible to be a day-job geek who never plays video games, doesn't own an iphone, and doesn't read xkcd, yet still thrive in high-tech.

Since when does owning a phone every non-geek has make you a geek?

It was probably developed more for phones that do not have great javascript abilities (such as black berries) than for IE6.

You should be ashamed you watched enough voyager to get the reference.

Shouldn't you be ashamed you knew which show it was in reference to?

hah! no, Symfony and Zend would be one and two. and #3 is NOT Joomla!

Symfony and Zend are php frameworks, not CMS's.

• CMS
  1. Drupal
  2. Joomla
  3. ModX
  4. SilverStripe

• Frameworks
  1. Symfony
  2. Zend
  3. CakePHP
  4. Code Igniter

I've been adding the following to my desktop computer host files for over a year to block google's tracking:

127.0.0.1 partner.googleadservices.com
127.0.0.1 google-analytics.com
127.0.0.1 ssl.google-analytics.com
127.0.0.1 googleadservices.com
127.0.0.1 googlesyndication.com
127.0.0.1 pagead2.googlesyndication.com
127.0.0.1 www.google-analytics.com
127.0.0.1 video-stats.video.google.com
127.0.0.1 wintricksbanner.googlepages.com
127.0.0.1 www-google-analytics.l.google.com

I trust that solution more than I do google's opt-out bs. If you want to get fancy, you can direct a lightweight web server like lighttpd to 404 the adservers to load your pages a bit faster (instead of letting them time out) and to keep logs of what adservers are trying to load.

Or just turn off the "Apple" section in your preferences, which is much more effective than moaning about it on the actual story, as many people seem to do.

Perhaps the parent is like me and doesn't want to turn off the Apple postings because maybe 1 in 8 isnt about the ipad/iphone/iwhatever and is actually newsworthy and perhaps interesting. It would be nice if slashdot made some sort of way to filter out iCrap and keep the other postings about Apple.

I like slicehost for a number of reasons, but you have to be willing to use a command line because there is no GUI unless you install one (because you're getting a virtual server with full root access).

Though they do not offer cpanel or anything like that, they do have a minimal admin panel that you can use to configure DNS, MX and set up your server (as well as automate backups, which start at like 5 a month or so).

For 20 a month, you get a 256mb ram virtual slice and around a dozen linux distros you can select from with their admin panel for the slice. If you dont like any of the ones they provide (very unlikely) you can opt to install your own with a set of directions they provide on their wiki (the wiki is also very helpful when setting up your server for whatever you might want to do).

Whenever I need help with a server issue, they email fairly quick (same day) or they have a chat room with people who actually speak English as their first language (or know it well enough you would assume they do). Generally, the people helping you are the same ones who maintain their website or their servers as well, not outsourced help.

Some dont like that they dont have any sort of guaranteed uptime, but eh, I've never really had any servers I have go down for more than an hour or so and it's generally sometime at night if they do. The downtime is generally planned or even if its an emergency, they notify with enough time you can migrate files to another server.

For 20 a month and the freedom of having full server access to install what you want, I'd gladly pay. I still loath when I have some clients who only want to pay 3-5 or whatever a month at some lame shared hosting site and have to deal with cpanel or whatever else, because once you've used the command line and had full control on a remote server it's hard to go back to the panel interface, lol.